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Teachers' Union to Weigh Extra Year of High School

Worried that the new academic standards required for a diploma in many states are impossible for hundreds of thousands of today's students to meet, the president of the American Federation of Teachers plans to propose on Monday that schools add an optional fifth year to high school.

In her speech as the union opens its biennial convention here, Sandra Feldman, the A.F.T. president, will call for a ''transitional-year'' program, either before ninth grade or in high school, in which adult-literacy specialists would help teenagers lacking basic skills catch up so they could confront more challenging course work. She will suggest that the country's educators borrow ideas from the military, which she said has successfully trained even illiterate youth.

''I'm talking about a segment of kids who are just absolutely falling through the cracks because no one's paying attention to them,'' Ms. Feldman said in an interview last week as she prepared her speech. ''Something's going to give here. Either people are going to talk about lowering the standards, which I think would be disastrous, or we're going to take it very seriously and provide whatever those kids need to meet the standards.''

After a decade in which every state but Iowa has adopted higher standards for achievement -- and 26 states have decided to require new tests for graduation by 2003 -- Ms. Feldman's proposal comes as many are suggesting that the current school calendar is inadequate to accomplish all the new goals.

Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley recommended this spring that teachers begin to work year-round, spending part of the extra time helping struggling students and part of it training to implement the higher standards. And an increasing number of upper-class students are taking a fifth year of high school at elite preparatory academies to improve their grades and scores for competitive colleges. (At the same time, Ontario, Canada, has recently phased out its Grade 13.)

''It's only common sense to think that students are going to need widely varying amounts of instructional time in order to achieve the requisite standards,'' said Paul Reville, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who was chairman of the Massachusetts Commission on Time and Learning from 1993 to 1995.

Noting that children start with different levels of knowledge and learn at different paces, Mr. Reville drew an analogy to a hospital. ''No one would think of prescribing a term of treatment for all conditions,'' he said. ''They're trying to bring you up to a standard of health. Some people are going to be there for two weeks and some will be there two hours.''

Ms. Feldman's idea is already on the agenda of the school board in Rochester, N.Y., which is scheduled to vote July 20 on a proposal, called Pathways, to create five- and three-year high school tracks to reclaim some of the district's dropouts and accommodate accelerated students who want to get a jump on college.

''With regard to high school, we used to hold time constant and vary quality,'' the superintendent, Clifford B. Janey, wrote in an essay recently explaining the idea. ''With the Pathways initiative, we will hold quality constant and vary time.''

While a current Rochester high school student typically takes 6.5 credits for each of four years, someone on the five-year plan might earn only 4 or 5 credits in some years, taking double periods of English or biology to go over the same material more slowly. A student trying to finish in three years might take high school level math, biology and foreign language while in eighth grade, then load up with 7 or even 8.5 credits during the sophomore and junior years to graduate early.

Mr. Janey said he did not know how much such a program would cost to implement or how many students would participate. The class of 2000 started with 2,255 students in 1996, but graduated just 1,247 this spring, he noted, adding that a formal fifth-year program would prevent dropouts by reducing the sense of failure associated with not finishing in four years.

Nationally, there are about 415,000 high school dropouts a year, Ms. Feldman said.

The discussion over high school scheduling comes at the beginnings of a backlash against the new standards and high-stakes tests, as parents worry that their children will be denied diplomas many had taken for granted. In Arizona last year, only 1 out of 10 sophomores passed a math test that soon will be required for graduation. Wisconsin recently withdrew a graduation test after protests swept the state.

Ms. Feldman, whose 1 million-member organization is the smaller but often more aggressive of the nation's two teachers' unions, sees her proposal for a transitional year as a temporary one, intended to help a generation of students who were not subject to the rigorous new curriculum in the lower grades but will be held accountable by tests in high school. Others, though, think more flexible high school schedules make sense if schools expect all students to meet the new high standards.

''Some kids take longer to be potty trained than others, some students take longer to talk than others, some students take longer to ride a bike than others,'' said Amy T. Wilkins of the Education Trust, a Washington organization that works to close the achievement gap between minority and white students. ''If one of your children takes longer to master any one of those skills, you don't say, 'Oh, she's a failure.' We can expect kids to acquire certain skills over an academic career that may be 12 years, may be 13 years -- may be 11 or 10 years.''

Judith Johnson, deputy assistant secretary of the federal Department of Education, noted that the portion of students finishing college in four years has dropped from 45.4 percent in 1977 to 31.1 percent in 1993. She also said it took her longer than most to learn how to drive a stick shift on the streets of New York City.

''Today, when I shift, you have no idea that it took me 20 lessons or 12 lessons -- you simply know that I know how to shift,'' Ms. Johnson said. ''The issue is acquiring and demonstrating, not how long it takes to get there.''